From Paranormal Encounter to Spooky Tale

©Cynthia Rintye

Why tell the same scary stories as everyone else?  You can (and should) create original ghost stories.

When I led ghost tours, guests would share with me their encounters with the paranormal.  These were great anecdotes, but they were not stories.  However, YOU can take a paranormal encounter and craft it into a spooky tale.  

Consider an account about seeing a little girl appear out of nowhere.  That is not much to go on, but we are storytellers.  We can create the material needed to transform this encounter into a full-fledged story.  

Here are some questions to answer:

• Did the encounter happen to you or someone else? 
• Does this ghost want to help or harm, or does she need help?
• Is she stuck in a loop always repeating the same action, or is she there to deliver a message? 
• How and where did she die?  
• Is the focus on her or on the person who sees her?

Let’s make some choices and weave two different stories around this one thread. 

Below are outlines using the ABDCE structure. ¹

Story One Choices:

• It happened to you; the ghost is helpful; she delivers a message; it occurs in an old factory; the focus is on her.  

Story One ABDCE:

• Action: You find an online newspaper article and feel drawn to the image of a girl in grimy clothes. 
• Background: You’ve moved into an old factory that was recently converted into lofts.  Taking a break from unpacking, you research the building’s history on your laptop and find an article about the factory that includes this girl’s picture.  
• Development: You imagine how the girl’s carefree childhood ended when she was forced to work in horrible conditions as child labor.  
• Climax: You look up to see the girl from the photo standing in front of you, her eyes imploring, her hand beckoning.  You grab your computer and run, not away from her, but towards her.  A stack of boxes topples onto the place where you had been sitting.  The girl disappears.    
• Ending:  You open your computer and see that the article describes an industrial accident where one worker, a girl, was killed when heavy boxes fell on her.   You, out loud, thank the girl.

Now, let’s change just two things: the focus of the story and where it happened.  

Story Two Choices:

• It happened to you; the ghost is helpful; she delivers a message; it occurs on a road; the focus in on you.

Story Two ABDCE:

• Attention grabber: “I will never know who she was, but I know she saved my life.”

• Background: You just broke up with your significant other and drive away in heavy rain, upset and angry. 

• Development:  Full of despair, you replay the fight and regret all the wrong choices that have brought you here.  You see a little girl standing in the road.  Slamming on the brakes, you jump out of your car to scream at her for being in the way.  But she is not there.  

• Climax: As you look for the girl, you notice that the road in front of you has washed away, and if the little girl had not stopped you, you would have crashed.

• Effect: You realize that the mystery girl saved your life, you turn the car around and resolve to turn your life around.

The same paranormal encounter yielded two vastly different stories.

So, give it a try.  Take the same encounter and make different choices, or work with the plots outlined above.  Then add the elements that will build a compelling narrative: context, sensory imagery, characterization, emotion, and connection.²

¹Anne Lamott writes about the ABDCE storytelling structure in Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.  She attributes the form to Alice Adams.

² If my description of how to take a story from plot to narrative seems familiar, it was purely intentional.  My story work is strongly guided by Elizabeth Ellis’ From Plot to Narrative.  

Cynthia Rintye is a dynamic and innovative storyteller and musician.  Her album The Veil of Time: Ghost Stories from Atlanta received a 2018 Storytelling World honor.  She lives in Greater Atlanta. She will be delivering a spooky storytelling workshop for NSN on October 31. Check out the NSN website for registration information.